As for the this year’s theme, mommy choose Mickey Mouse theme since it’s Jojo’s favorite character. So we prepared all things Mickey, from the birthday invitation cards, birthday goodie bags, birthday cake, gift enclosure cards, and bento boxes that we need to make ourselves.

On Sunday morning we celebrated Jojo’s birthday at Sunday school with all his friends there. It was a very modest celebration, we just sang some birthday songs, pray, and then everyone shook Jojo’s hand. At the end of the class, every kids got a goodie bag from us.

From Sunday school we went to celebrate with kids from the orphanage. We went to their church and have a special celebration there. All the kids were very happy to celebrate with us. We also gave some books and stationery for each kids and our friends who came there with us donated some clothes as well. Since there were lots of kids (around 150) we didn’t prepare our bento boxes instead we just order some boxed rice to eat together.

On Monday there’s celebration at Jojo’s school. We prepared same goodie bags like for Jojo’s Sunday school’s friends, a Mickey theme birthday cake, and our specially made Mickey mini bento boxes. Since it’s for a special occasion, I wanted to packs lots of things inside those mini boxes. We have a Mickey Mouse onigiri, sausages, broccoli chunks, corn, strawberry jelly, champagne grapes, and chocolate candy.

Those Mickey onigiri was made with Mickey cookie cutter and since it’s not an onigiri mold, it’s harder to make and I need to watch those ears since it tends to break from its head if we don’t put enough rice between them. The brown ears were made using brown pasta sheet, those were very easy since they can be cut directly using the cookie cutter. As for the facial details, those also very easy with the specially made Mickey Mouse nori cutter I’ve acquired recently. I made total of 16 (sixteen) boxes for around 2 hours long, it’s quite fast since basically I prepared them by myself almost without help.

On Tuesday afternoon we also had another celebration at Jojo’s bible school. It’s a special event since we celebrating for 3 kids, Jojo and two of his friends who’s birthday only separate one day each (July 25-26-27th). I didn’t prepare bento boxes for the kids since they’re having a dinner party at KFC after school was over.

We also had a candle blowing session on Sunday night at home since Jojo loves to blow candle. We did it many times since it makes him very happy. It’s kind of weird feeling for me since during the morning celebration at Sunday school, there’s a kid who’s really afraid of candle so he’s start looking for his mommy when he found out there’s a birthday celebration, luckily for him we didn’t bring the cake and the candle.

So that’s all about Jojo’s birthday parties, I managed to took a shot of the goodie bag, cake, and mini bento, all Mickey (there’s a gift enclosure card also attached on the goodie bag).

As for the cake, we didn’t make it by ourselves. Those Mickey and friends are toys and as for the fondant decoration, it’s very neat and clean, professional work of art, although the cake itself has average taste. But overall it’s a very good birthday cake and Jojo loves it, that’s what important.

We tried to pack as many things as possible for this bento. There’s pair of onigiri (rabbit and bear, shaped with onigiri mold), a bunny (with carrot ear) and a piggy (with ham ear and nose) quail eggs, a pair of chicken nuggets with our special panko mix, sausages, broccoli chunks, corn ears, and an assorted shaped jelly (bear, elephant, rabbit, duck, and car).

The most difficult thing to do preparing this kind of bento was placing those tiny cuts of nori onto all the onigiris and quail eggs. Usually I made my assistants did all the cutting first and had them separate all the different shapes and put them into different containers. And then in the morning after we’ve prepared the onigiri I started to decorate the onigiri with those nori.

It’s a long process but after we finished them all, usually we’d become really happy to see all those cute face from those onigiris and quail eggs and take some pictures of them.

Just a quick post for today, we made this mini bento for Kenneth’s 4th birthday party. Total of 70 bento mini boxes for Kenneth and all of his friends. Hope that they’re all enjoy the breakfast we made.

This bento combined lots of items together, there’s rabbit onigiri with fried anchovies inside, and then we also put rabbit quail egg, sausages, broccoli chunks, sweet corns, along with sweet pink strawberry flavor jelly, plus colorful chocolate candy. So there’s everything inside the mini boxes for those kids.

The bible school theme that week was Jesus stopping the storm, so I thought of making a boat and sea theme for everyone. I made some simple sketches of boat and sea and counted that I need at least five different colors to make those scene. This was a very simple bento using sandwiched bread with margarine and chocolate meises filling and using the bread as white ‘canvas’ for all decorations.

I prepared all pasta on Friday afternoon. Since this was the first time I made the pasta, I only made some minor adjustment to the pasta recipe. The basic pasta recipe is high protein flour and a little of vegetable oil and egg. We also need a pasta machine to make the pasta dough into thin pasta (lasagna) layers.

We will get a light yellow colored pasta if we only using those basic ingredients. For other colors, we need to add different colored liquid or powder into the basic ingredients. For this project, I used cocoa powder to make the brown colored pasta (the pasta also got chocolate taste), tomato ketchup to make the orange colored pasta, strawberry juice to make the pink colored pasta, and light blue food coloring to make the green sea colored pasta (the combination of blue and yellow from the egg yolk make the green colored pasta, next time I’ll try adding egg white only).

We need to cook those layered pasta on boiled water and dry them with kitchen towel before we eat or cut them with vegetable cutter or knife. The cooked pasta can be stored in freezer for a month as long as we wrapped them well with plastic wrap.

As for the ornaments, almost all of them were made using tools, mainly vegetable cutter for the moon, stars, clouds, the boat, fishes (using sliced carrot), and pastry cutter and knife for the sea. Except those fishes, all of them were cut on Friday night and stored in the freezer then assembled on Saturday morning.

Another reason I made this one is also because I never made a ‘sweet type’ bento, to think of it most people also only make a regular ‘savory type’ bento even when we use bread (with ham and sausages). From the result I can feel that this ‘sweet type’ bento is having less calories than the usual bento but I think it’s still okay for kids having this kind of bento for once a while.

I used white bread for the base and wheat bread for the ‘birthday cake’, they have different colors but didn’t show much on the picture. I used icing sugar for the decoration, strawberry jam for the red line, and cheddar cheese on the bottom part of the ‘cake’. As for the ‘candles’ I broke a pocky into several pieces and use red icing sugar for the ‘fire’.

For the rest of the filling, fruits (strawberries, red and white grapes), chocolate candies, cheddar cheese cut into cube and wrapped with plastic paper, and cookies with additional melted chocolate for the writing.